The Cult of Precaution
Mini Teaser: The high priests of the European Commission invoke the arcane scripture of the Precautionary Principle to justify their environmental enyclicals--the wages of reason be damned.
The European Union is seeking a "common foreign policy", which will not be the policy of a nation-state, based in national interest and realpolitik, but a policy suitable to its transnational identity and universalist aims. Environmental protection will therefore be high on the agenda, and policy will be guided by principle rather than expediency, and shared concerns rather than national self-interest. Which principles, therefore, in relation to which shared concerns?
Early on in the debates over environmental protection, the European Greens began to refer to something called the Vorsorgeprinzip (Foresight Principle). This Principle appears to have begun life in pre-war Germany, and was invoked later in the 1960s as the blanket justification for state planning. Re-issued in the 1970s under the name of the Precautionary Principle, it is now being advocated at every level of European politics as a guide to regulation, legislation and the use of scientific research. Great Britain's prime minister has invoked it, addressing the Royal Society in 2002, when he told the assembled body of distinguished scientists that "responsible science and responsible policymaking operate on the Precautionary Principle." Yet nobody seems to know what the principle says. Does it tell us to take no risks? Then surely it is merely irrational, since everything we do has a risk attached. Or does it tell us to balance the benefits of risk-taking against the costs? Then it is merely reminding us of a fundamental law of practical reasoning. Or is it adding some new axiom to decision theory that will enable us to deal with the hazards of modern technology in a way that will safeguard the future of mankind? If this be the case, then we need a clear statement of what it says and clear grounds for believing it.
A footnote to the 1982 Stockholm environmental conference recommended the Precautionary Principle as the acceptable approach to scientific innovation--but did nothing to define it. Thereafter the principle was repeatedly mentioned in European edicts as authority for a creeping regime of regulation which ostensibly had the protection of the public as its rationale but which also had the stifling of innovation as its consequence. In 1998 a gathering of lawyers, scientists, philosophers and green activists in the United States produced the Wingspread Statement defining the principle thusly:
"When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically."
This is a definition of nothing, since any activity can be deemed to comply with it. Finally, in 2000, the European Commission published a 29-page communication on the principle, purporting to clarify its use, but again answering the need for a definition with a fudge. The principle, it said, may be applicable
"where preliminary scientific evaluation indicates that there are reasonable grounds for concern that the potentially dangerous effects on the environment, human, animal or plant health may be inconsistent with the high level of protection chosen for the Community."
The words "preliminary", "potentially", "may" betray the essential retreat from precision that this statement involves. And the reference to a "high level of protection chosen for the Community" naturally leads to the question, "chosen by whom?" The statement is in fact a license to forbid any activity that a bureaucrat might judge--on whatever flimsy grounds--to have a possible cost attached to it.
The astonishing fact is that, although nobody knows what the Precautionary Principle says, it has now become a doctrine of European law. A recent decision of the European Court of Justice, having invoked the Precautionary Principle, concluded that the government of Italy is justified in preventing the sale of gm food on the basis that "no human technology should be used until it is proven harmless to humans and the environment." Taken literally, that would forbid every innovation in food technology that we have recently witnessed. Personally, I am entirely in favor of a law that forbids non-biodegradable packaging, since I know that this is intensely damaging to the environment. But the ruling of the Court has not been applied to that case, since the attempt to apply it would bring our entire food economy to a standstill. Moreover, the ruling, because it forbids everything, permits everything too, since it compels us to construe everything that we do as an exception. The ruling can therefore be used arbitrarily to prevent whatever initiatives the bureaucrats momentarily take against, regardless of any serious study of the effects on health, on the environment or on the life of the planet. This is the inevitable result of making a meaningless nostrum into a rule of law.
But there is an underlying issue here that needs to be addressed. As the bureaucrats take over the task of legislation, and our European parliaments are reduced to public relations exercises, the law changes character. Instead of creating the framework in which human beings can take risks and assume responsibility for doing so, law becomes a universal obstacle to risk-taking--a way of siphoning responsibility from society and transferring it to the impersonal state, where it can be safely dissolved and forgotten. As soon as there is the faintest suspicion of risk, the bureaucrats will step in with an edict, in the form of a "directive" issued by the European Commission. These directives are non-negotiable commands, which cannot be amended by national parliaments. But nor can their authors be held to account for them. The Precautionary Principle justifies everything that they do, since they need nothing more than "preliminary" scientific evaluation, giving "grounds for concern" that the "potential" effects "may" be inconsistent with the "high level of protection" that the bureaucrats themselves have chosen.
The result is illustrated by the directive banning the use of certain phthalates, which are pvc softeners used in making children's dummies, teats and so on. The "preliminary" scientific evaluation consistent in slight evidence from one Danish researcher indicated that phthalates may be carcinogenic. His research has never been confirmed by peer review and was rejected by the European Commission's own scientific committee. However, the Precautionary Principle got to work on this non-evidence and converted it at once into conclusive grounds for panic. For what the principle really says, when examined in the context of its use, is this: "If you think there may be a risk, then there is a risk; and if there is a risk, forbid it." Once again we are dealing with a principle that forbids and permits everything. Its effect is both arbitrary and absolute, silencing all counter-argument. It is therefore an extremely effective political weapon, and can be used not only by bureaucrats, but also by all unrepresentative and unaccountable pressure groups, to enforce their point of view on the rest of us. Behind the edict forbidding phthalates there marches the regiment of self-appointed environmental guardians, who see the chemical industry as Public Enemy No. 1. Even if nobody gains from the edict, at least the industry that has invested so much in this product will suffer. And for the activists that result is a good in itself.
The Precautionary Principle clearly presents an obstacle to innovation and experiment. But there are deeper reasons for being troubled by it, reasons that bear on the very essence of human life and on our ability to solve practical problems. First, there is the tendency of the principle to disaggregate risks in ways that defeat the possibility of reasonable solutions. Risks are never single, nor do they come to us only from one direction or from one point in time. By not taking the risk of angering my child, I take the risk of dealing, at some later stage, with a spoiled and self-centered adolescent. All practical reasoning involves weighing risks against one another, calculating probabilities, ring-fencing uncertainties, taking account of relative benefits and costs. This mode of reasoning is instinctive to us and has ensured our extraordinary success as a species. There is a branch of mathematics--decision theory--devoted to formalizing it, and there is nothing in decision theory that looks like the Precautionary Principle. For the effect of this principle is to isolate each risk as though it were entirely independent of every other. Risks, according to the principle, come single-wrapped, and each demands the same response--namely--Don't! If, in obeying this command, you find yourself taking another risk, then the answer again is "Don't!"
The principle is therefore logically on a par with the command given by an American president to his senior civil servant: "Don't just do something, stand there!" But, as the president realized, standing there is not something that civil servants are very good at. Bureaucrats have an inveterate need to be seen to be doing something. The effect of the principle therefore is to forbid the one identified risk, while removing all others from the equation. What this means can be vividly seen from a recent instance. A European directive, responding to the slight risk that diseased animals might enter the human food chain, insists that all slaughter should now take place in the presence of a qualified vet, who must inspect each animal as it arrives at the abattoir. There is no evidence that veterinary examination in these circumstances is either necessary or (in the rare cases when infected animals come to the abattoir) effective. Nevertheless, the Precautionary Principle delivered its usual result, and the edict was imposed. Small abattoirs all over Britain were forced to close down, since their profit margins are as narrow as those of the farmers whom they serve, and qualified vets require fees that reflect their qualifications.
The effect of this on husbandry, on the social and economic life of farming communities, and on the viability of small pasture farms has been devastating, the effect on animal welfare equally so. Instead of travelling a quarter of an hour to the local abattoir, our herds must now travel three or four hours to one of the great processing plants that enjoy the presence of a permanent vet. Farmers who have taken pride in their animals and cared for them through two or more winters are distressed to part with them on such terms, and the animals themselves suffer greatly. This damage done to the relation be-tween farmer and herd has further adverse effects on the landscape. Unable to take full responsibility for the life and the death of his animals, a farmer ceases to see the point of his unprofitable trade. The small pasture farms that created the landscape of England are now rapidly disappearing, to be replaced by faceless agro-businesses or equestrian leisure centers. This damages our landscape, and in doing so damages our sense of nationhood, of which the landscape has been the most potent symbol.
As if those long-term costs were not bad enough, we have also had to endure the short-term cost of hoof-and-mouth disease, which in the past would usually be contained in the locality where it broke out. In its latest occurrence, the disease was immediately carried all over the country by animals on their way to some distant abattoir. The result was the temporary, but total, ruination of our livestock farming.
Now, a responsible politician would have taken into account, not only the small risk addressed by the directive, but also the huge risks posed to the farming community by the destruction of local abattoirs, the risks posed to animals by long journeys, the benefits of localized food production and local markets for meat, and so on. And he would have a motive for considering all those things, namely, his desire to be re-elected, when the consequences of his decision had been felt. As a rational being, he would recognize that risks do not come in atomic particles, but are parts of complex organisms, shaped by the flow of events. And he would know in his heart that there is no more risky practice than that of disaggregating risks, so as one by one to forbid them. Even bureaucrats, in their own private lives, will take the same line. They too are rational beings and know that risks must constantly be taken and constantly weighed against each other. However, when a bureaucrat legislates for others and suffers no cost should he get things wrong, he will inevitably look for a single and specific problem and seize on a single and absolute principle in order to solve it. The result is the Precautionary Principle and all the follies that are now issuing from the unconscionable use of it.
This suggests another and deeper irrationality in the principle. It is right that legislators should take risks into account, but not that they should automatically forbid them, even when they can make a show of isolating them from all other relevant factors. For there is an even greater risk attached to the habit of avoiding risks--namely, that we will produce a society that has no ability to survive a real emergency when risk-taking is the only recourse.
It is not absurd to think that this is a real danger. How many a soporific Empire, secure in its long-standing abundance, has been swept away by barbarian hordes, simply because the basileus or caliph had spent his life in risk-free palaces? History is replete with warnings against the habit of heeding every warning. Yet this is the habit that the Precautionary Principle furthers. By laying an absolute edict against risk, it is courting the greatest risk of all, namely, that we shall face our next collective emergency without the only thing that would enable us to survive it.
If Clausewitz teaches us nothing else, he must surely persuade us that strategy in war proceeds according to principles of practical reasoning that are equally valid in peacetime. Victory does not come through taking no risks, but through balancing risks against each other and recognizing the limits to certainty. Strategic thinking in war is no different from strategic thinking in business. Moreover if, during times of peace, we allow the capacity for reason to atrophy, then we shall feel the consequences in war. Unwilling to take the risk of fighting on terms that were not overwhelmingly favorable, President Roosevelt found himself forced to fight nevertheless, but without a Pacific fleet. This does not mean that a "high risk" strategy is always the wisest one. It means only that risk is the premise of strategic thinking, and strategic thinking the sine qua non of success. In war the cost of failure is the loss of everything. In peace it is the loss of something. But in both cases rational decision-making does not mean avoiding risks, but choosing between them.
Although the Eurocrats have made the Precautionary Principle into the foundation of their legislative program, we should not think that this disease of practical reason is confined to the Continent. Environmental NGOs have made repeated use of another non-definition, which is found in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development of 1992. According to Rio,
"the Precautionary Principle states that: where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."
Looked at in one way, that makes the common-sense claim that, when taking a risk, we should take reasonable measures to reduce the cost of it. Looked at in another way, however, it merely says "Don't!" And it is in this second way that the principle is always interpreted by the activists, so that instead of contributing to the solution of our collective problems, it merely prevents us from addressing them. This has led governments everywhere to abandon nuclear energy programs, even though they provide the best hope for a clean and renewable source of energy.
Nor should we assume that the principle is effective only where it is officially recognized. American legislators are unlikely to invoke the principle, since they recognize the extent to which it impinges upon entrenched civil freedoms. But American litigiousness has the same effect as the European nanny state. There are places in America where no doctor will take the risk of delivering a baby for fear of a malpractice suit that will cost him all that he has. Scouting trips and adventure sports are now rapidly disappearing as people acquire the habit of suing for every injury. And local legislatures try to forestall litigation by laws that have the same mad absolutism as the European edicts. The state of Massachusetts has even passed a law against sushi--that is to say, you will be allowed to eat sushi only if it has first been either cooked or frozen, so ceasing, in effect, to be sushi. This is because there is a miniscule risk that sushi, in its normal condition, will make you sick. And this is a risk that the citizens of Massachusetts are no longer allowed to take. Manufacturers of children's playgrounds now predict that swings in public playgrounds will become a thing of the past, since safety regulations require prohibitively expensive padding beneath them. The regulations surrounding children's toys, clothes, and activities are now so strict that it is no longer possible to have the kind of childhood that we read about with such longing and wonder in American classics like Huckleberry Finn.
When assessing the Precautionary Principle, therefore, we should recognize that it is one aspect of a risk-denying and risk-averting culture. American litigation and European regulation both have the same effect: to increase the cost of risk to the point where risks really do become irrational. The cost is financial in America, penal in Europe. But the effect is the same.
Rational beings, who are risk-takers by nature, no longer take the risks that they ought to be taking, since the cost has been artificially elevated by litigation and law. The result does not damage adults only: It damages their children far more, threatening the very possibility of what was once considered a normal childhood. Boys used to join the Scouts, to go on camping holidays in which they learned the arts of survival, to take part in athletic sports that strengthened the body and also occasionally injured it, to expose themselves to hardships in order to enjoy the sense of overcoming them, and in all kinds of ways to surround themselves with character-forming dangers. Sometimes accidents happened, and sometimes bad things were suffered or done. Still, there was a widely shared sense not only that young people were strengthened by this kind of activity, but also that they enjoyed it, learned from it, and were better able as a result to cope with the stresses of adult life and the demands of ordinary decision-making.
There is no evidence that people were wrong to think in that way. On the contrary, they were sensible of the truth, elaborately defended by Aristotle, that success in action requires virtuous habits, and virtuous habits must be acquired early if they are to be acquired at all. Young people brought up to think their way through practical difficulties acquire the art of survival. The risk-averse and timorous have no capacity to confront, still less to survive, a real emergency, nor are they likely to do well in ordinary competitive business. In love, as in war, they will be the losers, and only where they can fall back on the nanny state will they be sure of protection. Yet the nanny state itself depends upon the risk-takers, since it is on their taxes that the whole structure of institutionalized timorousness is built.
This does not mean that we should dismiss the anxieties to which the Precautionary Principle is proposed as an illusory solution. It is very clear that we must distinguish risks in which the cost falls on the person who takes them from risks in which the cost is exported to the rest of us. We can manage risks of the first kind, by providing suitable warnings, such as the health warnings affixed to alcohol and tobacco, and which many might wish to affix also to junk food, televisions and all the other products that rot the minds or bodies of those who consume them. But risks of the second kind cannot easily be managed, since no individual is wholly responsible for the damage, or solely able to repair it. Hence we need policies to reduce the cost of what we do by distributing the power to repair it. That was the principle behind the old bottle-deposit habit, which rid the world of glass bottles and could rid it too of the far more damaging plastic bottles that are now clogging up our waterways, ditches and landfill sites. According to this principle, each person who enjoys the benefit of an innovation is made to pay a proportionate amount of the socially distributed cost. The innovation goes ahead, and the damage is rectified. This kind of solution has recently been generalized by Robert Costanza, an economist at Maryland University, who is trying to put something precise in place of the Precautionary Principle.
Until rendered precise in this way, however, the Precautionary Principle is merely a brake on the kind of research that we need to undertake if we are to manage our growing environmental problems. In the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, there can be no riskier policy. If we are to apply the Precautionary Principle at all, therefore, we should apply to itself. And the answer will be "Don't!"
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